Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860

WOMEN AND TEMPERANCE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA, 1830-1860 Ian R. Tyrrell The unks between temperance and agitation for women's rights in American history have been long recognized as profound, buthistorical attention has focused unduly on the late-nineteenth-century women's temperance movement and its relationship with the crusade for female suffrage.1 Very much less is known for the pre-Civil War years, even though women already occupied an important place in temperance agitation and despite the fact that later trends in women's temperance had their origins before the Civil War. The historical investigation of antebellum women's temperance has been hindered by the obscurity of women's agitation and its partly noninstitutional character. Lacking a strong organizational focus comparable to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), antebellum women's temperance must be approached through studies of local action, from fragmented records concerning obscure women, a good deal of whose reform activity probably took place in the privacy of their own drawing rooms and kitchens. But the elusive character of women's temperance and its I wish to thank my colleagues and friends Beverly Kingston, Diane Collins, Tony Mitchell, and Jack Blocker for reading versions of this paper, while absolving them of responsibility for its conclusions. 1 Surveys of the temperance question and its connectionwithwomen's suffrage include Carrie Chapman Catt and N. R. Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics (1926; reprint ed., Seattle, 1969); Ella Stewart, "Woman Suffrage and the Liquor Traffic," Annals of the American Academy 56 (Nov. 1914):143-52; Ross Evans Paulsen, Women's Suffrage and Prohibition: A Comparative Study of Equality and Social Control (Glenview, IU., 1973); JanetGiele, "Social Change in the Feminine Role: A Comparison ofWoman's Suffrage and Woman's Temperance, 1870-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1961); Andrew Sinclair , The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (London, 1965), chap. 20. Since this article was substantially completed, a number of important studies on women and the temperance question have appeared or are in press. See especially Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelicalism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1981); Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia, 1981); and Jed Dannenbaum, "The Origins of Temperance Activism and Militano' Among American Women," Journal of Social History (Dec. 1981)¡forthcoming. Civil WarHistory, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2 Copyright®1982 byThe Kent State University Press 0009-8078/82/2802-0002 $01.00/0 WOMEN AND TEMPERANCE129 institutional weakness does not negate its importance. Prior to 1860, large numbers of American women had exerted influence in the home, signed the pledge, joined male-dominated temperance societies, formed the first women's temperance organizations, and petitioned for statewide prohibition. The generation of women that reached maturity in the 1830s was the first in American history to abstain from alcoholic consumption in large numbers, and its efforts for abstinence had a large effect not only on Jacksonian men but also on their children, because it was the daughters of this first generation of abstainers who formed the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1874. While recognizing the growing self-assertiveness exerted by women in temperance reform, it is equally important to understand that women's temperance emerged in the context of a larger movement that was led by and for men. To capture the character of the women's temperance movement as an independent force, it is therefore necessary to focus on the historical context of its emergence from the maledominated movement. This struggle occurred in three overlapping but distinct phases which corresponded to changes in the social bases of temperance support and to accompanying changes in the strategies and tactics of the larger movement. These phases were (1) the evangelicalled beginnings from 1826 to 1840; (2) the popularization of reform through the Washingtonians and other self-help groups in the 1840s; and (3) the political, prohibitionist campaigns of the 1850s which forged links with the nascent women's rights movement. The analogy with slavery—whichwomen's rights and female temperance reformers themselves employed—may be helpful in creating an analytical framework which will illuminate the ambiguous legacy bequeathed by the larger context...